Tuesday, April 18, 2017

Khalil Gibran Muhammad is a professor of history, race and public policy
at Harvard Kennedy School and the author of “The Condemnation of
Blackness: Race, Crime, and the Making of Modern Urban America.”

For
advocates and officials working to end the era of mass incarceration
and the use of excessive force by the police, our new attorney general,
Jeff Sessions, has indicated he intends to do just the opposite. At a
recent address to law enforcement officials in Richmond, Va., Sessions
announced plans for a new crackdown on crime. He wants to revive a
federal mandatory minimum sentencing program for illegal gun possession.
He suggests a return to Reagan-era zero tolerance approaches to drug
use. And he insists, despite nationwide crime rates at historic lows,
that a crime wave threatens to engulf America. Here we go again.

There
are at least two productive ways to look at these recent developments.
The success of Black Lives Matter activists and criminal justice
reformers caused a backlash that will demand greater resistance, renewed
activism and new strategies. The other is that the punitive style of
American racial politics has been a constant feature of our history;
unless something foundational changes, the United States will remain an
exceptionally punitive country, and the question is only one of degree.
According to this line of thinking, there will always be hell to pay for
somebody, especially poor people of color.

Two new books offer timely and complementary ways of understanding
America’s punitive culture and, in the process, stark pleas to abolish
it. In “Locking Up Our Own,” James Forman Jr. explains how and why an
influx of black “firsts” took the municipal reins of government after
the civil rights movement only to unleash the brutal power of the
criminal justice system on their constituents; in “A Colony in a
Nation,” Chris Hayes shows that throughout American history, freedom —
despite all the high-minded ideals — has often entailed the subjugation
of another.

Two new books offer timely and complementary ways of understanding
America’s punitive culture and, in the process, stark pleas to abolish
it. In “Locking Up Our Own,” James Forman Jr. explains how and why an
influx of black “firsts” took the municipal reins of government after
the civil rights movement only to unleash the brutal power of the
criminal justice system on their constituents; in “A Colony in a
Nation,” Chris Hayes shows that throughout American history, freedom —
despite all the high-minded ideals — has often entailed the subjugation
of another.

Forman,
a Yale Law School professor and former Washington, D.C., public
defender, has written a masterly account of how a generation of black
elected officials wrestled with recurring crises of violence and drug
use in the nation’s capital. Beginning in the late 1960s, these
officials faced the growing challenge of drug addiction to heroin and
later, crack. Forty-five percent of male jail detainees tested positive
for heroin in 1969, up from 3 percent in the early ’60s. During roughly
the same period the city’s murder rate tripled. By 1987, officials found
that 60 percent of Washington arrestees tested positive for crack
cocaine.

Letters
to public officials, mined by Forman, reveal that much of the black
community did not agree on what to do. No one disputed the facts of
rising drug use and ballooning murder rates across the city. Some of the
earliest options on the table ranged from decriminalization of
marijuana — following the lead of white civil libertarians — to
increased sentences. Many agreed that some measure of punitive
intervention was necessary. But how much could be deployed without
destroying the body politic or the social ecology of black Washington
was anybody’s guess. There were also calls for prevention and drug
treatment over punishment, targeting poverty as a root cause of crime. A
number of local and national civil rights leaders preferred to follow
Michigan Representative John Conyers’s proposal for an urban Marshall
Plan.

Ultimately,
Washington’s black officials embraced the Nixonian law-and-order mood
of the nation, passing increasingly tougher laws and adopting aggressive
policing practices into the 1990s. Marion Barry, Washington’s future
mayor, claimed the mantle of drug warrior (before he fell victim to his
own addiction), and the stark and visible pattern of African-Americans
increasingly locking up their own was replicated elsewhere. “When an
urgent problem required a short-term solution, law enforcement was
regarded as the only answer,” Forman writes. In 1978, Washington
appointed its first black police chief, Burtell Jefferson, a staunch
advocate for mandatory minimum sentencing, to lead the nation’s first
black-majority police department. By 1990, there were 130 black police
chiefs in the United States and more than 300 black mayors.

Given
a century of brutal, anti-black racism in the criminal justice system
after the Civil War, these developments give rise to some obvious
questions: When African-American officials finally gained a measure of
control over the machinery of the law, why did mass incarceration happen
on their watch? In other words, why did they lock up their own?

Forman
offers three explanations. First, black officials did not see mass
incarceration coming. No one did, he argues. It was “the result of a
series of small decisions, made over time, by a disparate group of
actors.” (Hayes makes the same point in his book.) Second, after legal
segregation fell, African-American class biases came to the fore. Class
privilege meant that middle-class and elite blacks had a smaller chance
of exposure to criminal victimization and the full hammer of the law,
especially long prison sentences. Citing a 1966 University of Michigan
study, Forman writes that “a surprising number” of working-class black
cops “didn’t like other black people — at least not the poor blacks they
tended to police.”

The
third reason is a big deal and a major breakthrough. Forman’s novel
claim is this: What most explains the punitive turn in black America is
not a repudiation of civil rights activism, as some have argued, but an
embrace of it. “African-Americans have always viewed the
protection of black lives as a civil rights issue, whether the threat
comes from police officers or street criminals,” he writes. “Far from
ignoring the issue of crime by blacks against other blacks,
African-American officials and their constituents have been consumed by
it.” Forman recalls his own experience as a public defender and the case
of a 15-year-old first offender who was facing sentencing for handgun
possession and a small bag of pot; a black judge, hearing Forman’s plea
for leniency, was unmoved. “Dr. King didn’t march and die so that you
could be a fool, so that you could be out on the street, getting high,
carrying a gun and robbing people,” the judge admonished. “No, young
man, that was not his dream.”

In
this way, post-civil-rights leaders reimagined Dr. King as a crime
crusader. In 1995, one year after Bill Clinton signed the biggest crime
bill in American history, the nation’s first black United States
attorney for the District of Columbia, Eric Holder, announced a major
anti-crime initiative called Operation Ceasefire at a Martin Luther King
Day celebration in Arlington: “Did Martin Luther King successfully
fight the likes of Bull Connor so that we could ultimately lose the
struggle for civil rights to misguided or malicious members of our own
race?”